Winter Heart Attacks Not Sparked by Cold

LOS ANGELES -- Escaping to a warmer climate might not necessarily keep you from suffering a heart attack in the "winter months," researchers found.

An analysis of seasonal deaths in seven regions in the U.S. with very different climates found that all-cause and cardiovascular deaths during December and January remained consistently high across all regions, according to Dr. Bryan Schwartz of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and Dr. Robert A. Kloner of Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles.

Death rates at all sites clustered closely together and no one site was statistically different from any other site, Schwartz reported here at the American Heart Association.

"We know that heart-related deaths increase in the winter months. But our research suggests there might be something other than climate at work here," Schwartz said. "If it was solely because of cold temperatures, we would have seen more deaths in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, and we didn't see that."